GM and Qualcomm partner for Ultra Cruise

Ultra Cruise, General Motors' next generation of hands-free ‘Super Cruise’ ADAS technology, will be powered by a scalable compute architecture featuring a system-on-chip (SoC) design developed by U.S. semiconductor company Qualcomm Technologies Inc. As announced by the two companies in January, GM will be the first automotive OEM to use Qualcomm's Snapdragon Ride platform for ADAS use. The new architecture features a 5-nanometer Snapdragon SA8540P SoC and SA9000P artificial-intelligence accelerator, which Qualcomm claims is “industry leading.”

SoC technology integrates, on a single microchip, all or most components of a computer, including a CPU (central processing unit), input/output (I/O) ports and secondary storage, with other components including radio modems and a graphics processing unit (GPU). Ultra Cruise's compute, described by GM as approximately the size of two laptops stacked together, will be available in 2023 on vehicles including the Cadillac Celestiq, a super-premium electric sedan using GM's BEV3 platform and expected to enter the market at more than $100,000. In that vehicle, two Snapdragon-based processors, including high-performance sensor interfaces, memory bandwidth and the Ultra Cruise software stack, will provide the necessary bandwidth for vehicle sensing, mapping, localization, and driver monitoring, according to the companies.